Letter: Change for the worse in North Yarmouth

Opinion

Letter: Change for the worse in North Yarmouth

Monday, June 21, 2010 at 9:50 am

In North Yarmouth we are fortunate to live where democracy in its purest form is practiced, to “stand up and be counted” at Town Meeting. I grew up here and graduated from Greely High. Now I am raising my family here. I have hunted here since I was 10 and now I take my son with me. I don’t hunt on town property, nor did I have any intention of doing so. I do however have a problem with our new ordinance. It was passed out of unfounded fear.

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I have worked in the largest intensive care unit in Maine for almost 20 years. How many hunting accident victims do I remember? One – maybe? I am a thousand times more fearful of the driver checking his iPhone or doing her makeup than I am of getting shot in the woods. By the way this vote went down, one would think that walking in the park would be akin to walking outside the wire in Afghanistan. The statistics just don’t bear that out. But fear-mongering is a tactic that has been used since time began for people to get their way.

The tide of change in our town is troubling to me. People move here for an excellent school system, a rural atmosphere close to the nerve center of the state, a practically nonexistent crime rate. Instead of trying to change things to suit your own idea of a “community,” why not remember why you came here in the first place?